Libyan immigrants: surviving does not mean living

Unofficial detention centres in Libya are camps where militias torture refugees until their families pay up. EU migration policy is silently complicit in an industry of extortion in a war zone. One warehouse hit by a bomb revealed hundreds of victims held in conditions that recall the Second World War.

Limbo was created in 2016 by Cecile Allegra and a group of human rights activists in response to a dramatic reality. They were appalled by the state of traumatic shock while they were spending time with young survivors of the torture camp in Libya.

Cecile Allegra is a French journalist, filmmaker and activist. In total she made three films: "Under the skin" (2014), "Libya, the anatomy of a crime" (2018), and her latest, "Songs of the living'; which focuses on a group of young refugees living in a therapeutic community run by Limbo.

"You are alive, but part of your brain is still dead, and it will try to push you towards death at a moment that you cannot predict. There is a serious risk of suicide, as happens with Syrian children in the camp on Lesbos. They just stop functioning, one day they wake up as a vegetable, because a child cannot commit suicide."

Governments and armies have their own agendas, where rescuing migrants from traffickers and from torture are low on their priorities. The EU concern is to keep migrants out -and out of sight- by funding Libyan coastguards, whose 'work' often means that refugees are sent back to torture camps run by traffickers, while some EU countries criminalize rescuers. At any one time there are between half a million and 1 million people stuck in Libya, not out of choice, they have been kidnapped and deported back.

This is the first part of a conversation that The Prisma had with Cecile after Songs was premiered at the Visions du Reel festival.

This interview was first published on 10th July 2021, and re-published on the same site, where it can be read in full with links and film stills: https://theprisma.co.uk/2022/02/28/libyan-immigrants-surviving-does-not-mean-living/